Sympathy means survival
For a society that is so oriented to growth and progress, we seem remarkably immune to good news. We have a deep philosophical cynicism about such simple things as love and sympathy, even though there is evidence that these are forces with significant impact in our world. We are suspicious of ideas like happiness, even if they are central to our highest ethics, both freedom and progress. How can you be free if you are so unhappy you cannot enjoy your good fortune? How can there be progress where this becomes a general condition? Progress or Prozac?
Take the decline of violence in the world: There are fewer and smaller wars now than ever before. The depressing spectacle of embedded journalism, during the last attempt to make war work, had lying beneath it a very good piece of news. People so dislike seeing others blown to pieces, that wars must now be structured around the public not seeing this happen. The media has extended people’s senses, and with it their consciences, and this has shaped the geopolitical ‘realism’ of the most powerful players in the world.
Now there are reasons to be wary of the all encompassing and magnetic qualities of positive sentiments and sympathy. They can indeed warp your view (they do mine) making one both willfully-blind and one-sided. They can also cause you to overlook details and differences in a quest to experience unity. Anthropology - a discipline supposedly founded in an interest in humanity, carries critical cynicism to an art form. Anthropological accounts of the broadly observed human urge for unity and community, and critiques of the startling power this has to shape people’s perceptions, are well-founded. But if you cary that critical philosophy too far it is easy to miss an elementary point: This wish for unity shapes the world, it makes the idea of a common public possible. It shapes politics and practice: it is part of what makes us make the world.
Without this awareness, one tends to default back to already established unities as lodestones: The nation, the state, this or that identity. Because if you see the shaping forces of affection as not being real, you miss where the game is going on. Certainly these are forces that are manipulated by politicians. But however suspicious you are of powerful people (which I am) it is hard to see how politicians could run a democracy without appealing to affections and attachments. But they also must attempt to remake the same, in order to shape the social world to better meet its future.
Now more than ever this needs to happen. If we do not extend the global sympathy that currently so greatly limits wars (despite the near unimaginable physical power available these days) to also limit our physical power over our environment, and thus prevent the massacre of distant others then we are at great risk of all perishing. For whilst we in the rich world are ‘culprits first and victims later’ in climate change, it is the poor’s current victim-hood and lack of culpability that should motivate us to meet our own future well. It is a shame that the media does not seize this opportunity to help us overcome our inertia and complacency. It is in sympathy that our hope lies, for without it we are all lost.